You'll need cruciferous vegetables if you want to make it to the point where your mind is placed into a cyborg...
Posted on 09/21/2011 6:29:28 PM PDT by LibWhacker
“Fingers!” Gerwin Schalk sputtered, waving his hands around in the air. “Fingers are made to pick up a hammer.” He prodded the table, mimicking the way we poke at computer keyboards. “It’s totally ridiculous,” he said.
I was visiting Schalk, a 40-year-old computer engineer, at his bunkerlike office in the Wadsworth Center, a public-health lab outside Albany that handles many of New York State’s rabies tests. It so happens that his lab is also pioneering a new way to control our computers — with thoughts instead of fingers. Schalk studies people at the Albany Medical Center who have become, not by choice, some of the world’s first cyborgs.
One volunteer was a young man in his 20s who suffers from a severe form of epilepsy. He had been outfitted with a temporary device, a postcard-size patch of electrodes that sits on the brain’s cortex, known as an electrocorticographic (ECoG) implant. Surgeons use these implants to home in on the damaged tissue that causes seizures.
Schalk took advantage of the implant to see if the patient could control the actions in a video game called Galaga using only his thoughts. In the videotape of this experiment, you see a young man wearing a turban of bandages with wires running from his head to a computer in a cart. “Pew, pew,” the ship on the computer screen whines, as it decimates buglike creatures. The patient flicks the spaceship back and forth by imagining that he is moving his tongue. This creates a pulse in his brain that travels through the wires into a computer. Thus, a thought becomes a software command.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping
From the information provided (above), would have to believe computers are winning the battles against our brains.
A public health facility is doing research on cyborgs, "not by choice?"
I know Albany is where Satan spends his summers, but even this seems over the top.
>>From the information provided (above), would have to believe computers are winning the battles against our brains.<<
“(me): You’ve posted a total of 86 threads and 43,041 replies.”
WinNING? ;)
I lost 20 wpm typing speed when I got hurt 2 years ago, not to mention not being able to play a grand piano anymore. 55 wpm sucks when you are used to doing better.
Heck, getting old sucks. I'm all for ways of bypassing the failing biology and getting effective control of better ways to relate with our ever growing cybernetic relatives.
/johnny
You'll need cruciferous vegetables if you want to make it to the point where your mind is placed into a cyborg...
Wouldn't be right looking for place to put something I lost years ago...
But I am good with any tech (not including murdered babies) they can stick in this meat sack to help with failure issues.
Eventually, I'll wander off this mortal coil and I don't care what happens to the meat sack I leave behind.
/johnny
Didn't you notice the writer? Pagan Kennedy.
gawd where do they come up with these? I read something once by a guy who called himself “David Balaam.”
“And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff. And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?” Numbers 22:27-28
There is an critical difference between human-technology melding techniques employed to restore health or correct dysfunction and the transhumanist urge to exceed normal capabilities or even give new functions to “healthy people who want to merge with their machines” [The Cyborg in Us All]. The latter risks the creation of cyborgs unrestrained by the limits of biophysiology, going beyond what is humanly possible and altering the essence of what it means to live as a human being (with its moral essence, the toll of aging and inevitable decline). The prohibitive cost of posthuman enhancements limits its use to a minority who are already privileged in their access to opportunity. Enhancements widen the gulf that already exists between the have and have-nots, worsening inequity and thereby threatening social cohesion. In elite sports, body-mind enhancement detract from the ideal of a level playing field at a stage when athletes are rapidly approaching the limits of physiological performance.
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